Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2734

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Lenzer J.
Professors speak out against advertising directly to consumers
BMJ 2005 Nov 5
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/331/7524/1040-b

Keywords:
DTCA

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

When 200 medical school professors sign a petition, you would think the authorities would take notice, however this is unlikely as their knowledge and understanding of their subject, and their care and concern for the health of the public are trumped by the money being poured into the election campaigns of members of Congress by the pharmaceutical companies.

Full text:

BMJ 2005;331:1040 (5 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7524.1040-b

News
Professors speak out against advertising directly to consumers
Jeanne Lenzer

New York

The drug industry’s “onslaught of advertising to promote prescription drugs… does not promote public health” and “increases costs and unnecessary prescriptions,” more than 200 US medical school professors said last week. In the United States the industry spends $4bn (£2.3bn; {euro}3.3bn) a year on direct to consumer advertising.

The professors signed a petition organised by Commercial Alert, an Oregon based nonprofit organisation that seeks to “protect communities from commercialism.” The petition was sent to the US Food and Drug Administration in response to a call for public comments before an FDA advisory committee’s hearing on direct to consumer advertising held earlier this week.

The professors say in the petition: “Prescription drug advertising pressures health professionals to prescribe particular medications, and often the ones that may be less effective and more expensive and dangerous. This intrudes on the relationship between medical professionals and patients, and disrupts the therapeutic process.”

That, say the signatories, wastes valuable time as doctors are forced to “explain to patients why they may have been misled by the drug advertisements they have seen.”

The doctors dismiss the idea that direct to consumer advertising is “educational,” saying: “It [such advertising] is inherently misleading because it features emotive imagery and omits crucial information about drugs.” This, they say, is the result of an “inherent and irredeemable financial conflict-of-interest” of the drug companies, which drives them to “exaggerate the positive and minimize the negative qualities of their own products.”

Jeff Trewhitt, a spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, disagreed. “The data show a different story,” he said, adding that direct to consumer advertising “is educational at a time when there is significant under-diagnosis and undertreatment of diseases that affect millions of Americans.”

Mr Trewhitt said that a study by the US health think tank Rand Health published in the New England Journal of Medicine “found that nearly half of all adults in the United States fail to receive recommended health care.” He said, “Medications were under-used in seven conditions, including asthma, congestive heart failure, diabetes, cerebrovascular disease, hyperlipidaemia, and hypertension.”